By: Chioma Madonna Ndukwu
Father’s Day: The Weight Fathers Rarely Speak About
I lost my father when I was still a toddler, and I grew up with a silence that had a name I could never pronounce properly.
I did not know his voice, but I knew his absence the way children know hunger. At school, when other pupils spoke about their fathers, I often smiled without understanding why my chest felt like it was folding in on itself.
Sometimes I would cry on my way home, quietly, like I was trying not to disturb the air. My mother did her best to fill the gap, and she truly did, but there are places in a child that respond only to a father’s presence, not effort.
I found myself growing conversations in dreams, speaking to a man I had never truly met. I would ask him why he left so early, even though I knew life had already answered that question in its own cruel way.
Even now, as an adult, I still miss him in small, unexpected ways. Sometimes it shows up in laughter I wish I could share with him, or in moments I wish I could hear his opinion, even if just once.
Fatherhood, from the Bible’s quiet wisdom, is not just authority, it is covering. “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him” (Psalm 103:13). Yet in reality, many fathers carry compassion they never learned how to express.
Society expects fathers to be strong without cracks, providers without pause, leaders without exhaustion. Children expect presence, consistency, and emotional certainty. Women often expect stability, protection, and direction that never shakes.
But beneath all these expectations, many fathers are simply human men trying to hold life together with tired hands. Some are carrying debts, unspoken fears, broken dreams, and emotional injuries they were never allowed to name.
As American author Clarence Budington Kelland once reflected:
“My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived, and let me watch him do it.”
A foreign voice I once heard during a community talk in Toronto, Canada, stayed with me. A grief counselor, Dr. Michael Harris, said: “Most fathers are not absent because they don’t care, but because they were never taught how to stay emotionally present.”
In Owerri, during an Orbits News field conversation, Mr. Kelechi Okafor, a secondary school teacher, shared quietly, “People think fatherhood is money, but my children remember more when I sit with them than when I buy things I cannot afford.”
In Eleme, Port Harcourt, a tanker driver named Mr. Boma Alabo said during an interview, “I leave before my children wake up and return when they are asleep. Sometimes I wonder if they know me more as a shadow than a father.”
There is a strange weight fathers carry, a responsibility that rarely allows softness. Even when they are breaking inside, they often choose silence because they believe silence is strength.
But silence can become a wound when it stays too long. A father who never speaks his struggles eventually becomes a stranger in his own home, even while living under the same roof.
The Bible does not only present fathers as providers, but also as guides. “Train up a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:6) is not only instruction, it is invitation into closeness, patience, and emotional investment.
Yet many fathers were raised in systems where affection was rare, and expression was mistaken for weakness. So they repeat what they were given, even when their hearts want something softer for their children.
As American poet Robert Frost once wrote:
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Women often carry the emotional weight of families, but still look to fathers for grounding. Children, on the other hand, interpret absence in many forms, sometimes as rejection, sometimes as indifference, even when it is neither.
What fathers rarely hear is that they are also allowed to be tired. They are allowed to need reassurance. They are allowed to be human without losing respect.
There is a quiet kind of pain in being a father who tries but feels unseen. And there is an even quieter one in being a child who loves a father who was never fully present.
If there is anything Father’s Day should remind us, it is that fathers are not just pillars, they are people. And even pillars need grounding, or they crack silently under weight.
My father may not have raised me physically, but his absence shaped my understanding of love, longing, and what presence truly means. Sometimes healing is not forgetting, but learning how to carry love without holding pain too tightly.
And maybe, just maybe, fatherhood is not only about being strong for others, but also being safe enough to be supported when life turns heavy.
A father is not just a provider of life, but a participant in it. The world feels different when fathers are not only respected, but also understood.
